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Dialogue, Responsibility and Literary Writing: Mikhail Bakhtin and His Circle

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Dialogue, Responsibility and Literary Writing: Mikhail Bakhtin and His Circle Semiotica 2016; 213: 307–343 Susan Petrilli* Dialogue, responsibility and literary writing: Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle DOI 10.1515/sem-2015-0094 Abstract: Mikhail Bakhtin cannot be discussed without discussing his friends and collaborators forming the Bakhtin Circle. The name Bakhtin itself announces a polyphony of different voices and viewpoints, internally to Bakhtin’s own voice and externally, all evidencing the word’s capacity for dialogism and otherness, the possibility of cohabitation and interference among different voices in the same word, the propensity for participative listen- ing, ultimately the inevitability of responsiveness/responsibility toward the other, that is, the other’s singularity. The name “Bakhtin” or, better, the expres- sion “Bakhtin Circle,” offers a concrete perspective for a world constructed in terms of multiplicity, diversity, and hospitality toward the other. This essay presents some characteristic aspects of Bakhtinian philosophy, keeping account of the writings collected in the 2014 bilingual volume Opere 1919–1930, pre- sented by the renowned Italian Bakhtin scholar Augusto Ponzio. Keywords: dialogism, listening, otherness, polyphony, responsibility, singularity Пытаясь понимать всю свою жизнь как скрытое представительство, а каждый свои акт, как ритуальный – мы становимся самозванцами. Всякое представительство не отменяет, а лишь специализует мою персональную ответственность. … ответственное не растворяется в специальном (политика), в противном случае мы имеем не поступок, а техническое действие. Se cerchiamo di interpretare la nostra vita intera come celata rappresentanza, e ogni nostro atto come rituale, diveniamo degli impostori. Ogni rappresentanza non abolisce, ma semplicemente specializza, la mia personale responsabilità. … il responsabile non si riduce allo specialistico (la politica), in caso contrario non avremmo un atto, ma azione tecnica. [If we try to interpret our whole life as hidden delegation, and every one of our acts as a ritual, we become impostors. *Corresponding author: Susan Petrilli, Department of Lettere, Lingue, Arti, Italianistica e Culture Comparate, University of Bari Aldo Moro, Via Garruba 6 Bari 70122, Bari, Puglia 70100, Italy, E-mail: [email protected] Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 15.11.16 10:26 308 Susan Petrilli Every representation does not abolish, but simply specializes, my personal responsibility. … the responsible person is not reduced to the specialized (politics), on the contrary we would not have an act, but technical action]. (Bakhtin in Opere 1919–1930: 124–125, 130– 131; “Per una filosofia dell’atto responsabile” [For a Philosophy of the Responsible Act], 1920–1924) 1 Topicality of a lifetime’s work In some cases the more time passes the more an author becomes topical. This is the case of Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle. This rather extraordinary fact can be stated with an expression adapted from Bakhtin’s own language. He speaks of the “great time” which he juxtaposes to the “small time” of contemporaneity. There exist enormously important works, but which emerge as such only in the ephem- eral time of their contemporaneity. And there exist works that endure far beyond the lifespan of the person who produced them and of their immediate addressees. This is generally the case of literary works. However, here we are engaged in tracing the possibility of life beyond one’s own time in writing that is not literary writing, but rather what Bakhtin himself defined as “philosophical” writing. However, there may be an explanation for this. Bakhtin’s philosophy, a philosophy pervaded by studies on the sign, insofar as it is based on listening, philosophy elaborated in terms of the “art of listening”, is a philosophy, or if we prefer, a semiotics of literature. Here “of literature” does not mean that literature is the object, but on the contrary that literature is the subject, the point of view, the angle from which we dialogue. Perhaps this is the “secret” that explains the “duration” of the ideas proposed by the Bakhtin Circle, ideas without property, without ownership, without belonging. “Circle” in the sense that the word circulates, it circulates freely in the Bakhtin Circle, it circulates freely as a “free word” by contrast with what is commonly referred to as “freedom of the word,”“freedom of speech”–a situation that Bakhtin and his “friends” indi- cated as the essential semi-other character of the word. How strong an impact writings by Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle have on cultural values today, their topicality for the quality of life and human relation- ships, is emphasized by the volume Opere 1919–1930, a first-time collection of fundamental texts by members of the Bakhtin Circle from the years indicated, in Russian original and Italian translation (see Bachtin e il suo circolo 2014). In fact, as a starting point for our reflections on Mikhail M. Bakhtin and the Bakhtin Circle, we shall begin from this bilingual volume (Russian / Italian), Opere 1919–1930: published in 2014 in the prestigious book series “Il pensiero occidentale,” Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 15.11.16 10:26 Dialogue, responsibility and literary writing 309 directed by Giovanni Reale. This volume presents a collection of writings by Bakhtin and members of the Bakhtin Circle (Michail Bachtin e il suo Circolo), in new Italian translations from the Russian original, edited and commented by the renowned Bakhtin scholar, Augusto Ponzio1 (Introduction, pp. VII–XXXII). Opere 1919–1930 is the arrival point of the latter’s studies on Bakhtin, which began during the second half of the 1970s and as an initial result led to publication of his monograph, Michail Bachtin, in 1980, the first ever at a world level.2 Bakhtin occupies a privileged place among the authors that have most contributed to the development of Ponzio’s own philosophical work. Similarly 1 Augusto Ponzio is Professor Emeritus at the University of Bari “Aldo Moro,” Italy, where he has taught Philosophy of language since 1970 and General linguistics since 1999. 2 Opere 1919–1930 is the expression of a project conceived and developed by Ponzio and the most recent result of groundwork carried out since the 1970s. He has worked uninterruptedly on writings by Bakhtin and this circle for over forty years, since the early 1970s when he first took an interest in Bakhtin’s philosophy occasioned by the Italian translation, which he supervised, of V. N. Vološinov’s Marksizm i filosofija jazyka from the 1973 English translation. During all these years Ponzio has produced a substantial number of publications specifically dedicated to Bakhtin and his circle, whether as the author of books and essays published in journals, Italian and international, or as editor of Italian translations of their works (see Ponzio 1977,1980, 1981, 1992, 1994a, 2015c). Among Ponzio’s monographs on Bakhtin, the first, Michail Bachtin. Alle origini della semiotica sovietica, appeared in 1980, the first at a world level as well. This was followed by Tra semiotica e letteratura. Introduzione a Michail Bachtin, published in the book series “Campo Semiotico,” directed by Umberto Eco, 1992 (new revised and enlarged edition 2003). In 1997 Ponzio published La rivoluzione bachtiniana. Il pensiero di Bachtin e l’ideologia contemporanea, a volume collecting studies on Bakhtin and his circle, written between 1975 and 1997, particularly well received in Latin American countries as well as in Spain and Portugal (Madrid, Cathedra, 1998; Sao Paolo, Contexto, 2008, 2nd enlarged ed. 2012). The expression “Bakhtinian revolution” indicates the shift in per- spective, operated by Bakhtin, from the logic of identity to the logic of alterity, where “alterity” implies excess and escape from the sphere of being, the same, the identical. Therefore two centers of value come into play and cannot be reduced to each other, two centers of value that stage irreducible otherness, the other of the Other and the other of the I. Fundamentos de Filosofia da Linguagem is the title of the first book by Ponzio published in Brazil (Portorico), with Vozes, in 2007 (original Italian edition 1994; co-authored with Patrizia Calefato and Susan Petrilli) (see Ponzio 1994b). In the enlarged Brazilian edition, philosophy of language is described in terms of “the art of listening,” clearly inspired by the writings of Bakhtin, Medvedev and Vološinov. Most recently, another original monograph by Ponzio on Bakhtin was published in Brazil in 2013, No Circulo com Mikhail Bakhtin, with no exact Italian correlate (see Ponzio 2013). Finally, I wish to signal another important collection of writings, published by Ponzio titled, Bachtin e le sue maschere (Bachtin et al. 1995), inspired by the title of a book series “Bakhtin and His Masks,” edited in Russia by V. L. Machlin during the early 1990s, which, in addition to M. M. Bakhtin’s Dostoevsky, collected the works of Medvedev and Vološinov. The 1995 volume co-edited by Ponzio contains other texts by Bakhtin, Vološinov, and Medvedev with respect to the 2014 collection. (For a complete overview of books and essays by A. Ponzio on the works of Bakhtin and his circle, see the bibliography appended to Opere 1919–1930.) Bereitgestellt von | De Gruyter / TCS Angemeldet Heruntergeladen am | 15.11.16 10:26 310 Susan Petrilli to his dialogue with Emmanuel Lévinas (1905–1995)3 to whom he has dedicated various monographs since 1967 (including publications in France with L’Harmattan, Paris), Ponzio’s engagement with Bakhtin has never been interrupted. Beyond addressing the question of dialogue, Ponzio’s reading and interpre- tation of Bakhtin is itself the expression of a dialogue with all those whom, in turn, have dedicated their attention to Bakhtin, including, among others, Tzevetan Todorov, Michael Holquist, Vladimir Krysinski, and René Wellek (Ponzio 2006, 2007, 2008b, 2012). For that which concerns the texts by Bakhtin translated and presented in Opere 1919–1930 (with the exception of the article on vitalism signed by I. Kanaev; see Bakhtin 1926), Ponzio refers to the works collected in the edition titled, Sobranie sočinenij, 1996–2010.
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